It helps to have long legs, at least while trekking through the Lost Lake Swamp in winter. Just before last week’s snowfall, a friend and I made our annual pilgrimage into another largely forgotten section of the swamp and found conditions that were tougher than I had expected.
After several warm days, the snow had a slight crust on top, which invariably broke under our snowshoes, revealing sugar snow underneath. For those who don’t do much snowshoeing, sugar snow is the last thing you want to see. The intertwined crystalline structure of fresh powder provides support under your snowshoes, but once thawing eliminates that structure, the support vanishes and each step is a struggle. We had been dropped off a few miles west of our house and had gone a mile and a half by the time we hit the worst of it, so there was no turning back. At that point, it looked like a miserable slog through stunted tamarack and dwarf birch.
Fortunately, help arrived in an unsuspected form.
We had reached the swamp from an unplowed Forest Service road that cuts north from Hwy. 1 and we weren’t too far down that road when we noticed there had been moose activity in the area, including some very fresh tracks that looked to have been laid down the day before, possibly even that morning. There were at least two, possibly three, which I took to be a cow and a couple now-mostly-grown calves. Friends had video-recorded just such a family group in that same vicinity late last summer, so this could easily have been the same animals.
I was happy to see the moose sign. While we had experienced a couple decades with very few moose in our general neighborhood, I’m regularly finding moose tracks, scat, and browsing activity in the area these days. It’s not quite the same as we experienced when we first moved to the area in the early 1980s, but we certainly have some moose back and I’ve been keeping mental notes on their activity. I suppose it’s one of the upsides of the recent decline in deer numbers in our region.
As we snowshoed toward the swamp edge, it was apparent the moose had found the dense cedar growing at the swamp edge to be useful cover. Moose beds are always impressive and these ones were no exception.
We had dropped into the swamp where we did to pick up the remnants of an old winter road that shows no sign of being used in decades. The road, at one point, provided access to one of the upland islands out in the swamp, and back in the 1980s, during severe winters, someone would regularly drive a snow machine out there to drop off corn for deer that tended to congregate in a dense white cedar grove on the island’s southwest corner. It’s been a few years since I’ve visited that grove so I don’t know if there’s much deer sign there these days, but I know it’s been decades since anyone fed deer out that way.
I assume the old road had once provided partial access as well for hunters who used to visit Little Lost Lake back in the day when the bluebill flights in our region justified the trouble of getting out there. I assume they had used the road in winter to haul building materials back to the lake. While the tiny lake, which is really just an opening in the muskeg, is normally uninhabited, hunters had built a little shack tucked into the spruce along the lake’s eastern shore. “Lost Lake Hilton” was stenciled to the old door and inside there were two bunk beds, a small wood stove and a crude table presumably for eating on. Even by the 1980s, it was getting pretty run down and someone finally torched it a decade or so ago. If anyone involved with the construction of the shack is still around, I’d appreciate hearing more about its history. There’s got to be a few stories in that escapade.
Times change, of course, and the old road that once provided access to a few humans has been largely abandoned to nature in more recent years. As we discovered, the old road had a certain appeal to the local moose, who had traveled a considerable distance along it, taking advantage of the red osier dogwood, willow, and dwarf birch growing there.
The moose, with their long legs, didn’t need snowshoes out there and we were happy to follow their tracks, since they had grown a bit icy in our mid-February thaw and so they held us up much better than the surrounding untracked snowpack. When the tracks cut off from the old road and headed east, in the direction we intended to go, I followed their trail as far as I could. At times their trail would veer in the wrong direction and I would have to leave their trail, which meant post-holing with every step up to my knees or deeper at times.
But then the moose trail would appear again and we’d get a brief respite from the slog. I was surprised to see evidence of their wanderings out into the swamp, since even with their long legs, it had to have been a bit of work to get around out there. Apparently, having access to the dwarf birch made it worthwhile for them, since once you’re well out into the swamp, the dogwood and willow disappear.
My guess is, we humans rarely think about dwarf birch, but it doesn’t just provide food for moose and other ungulates. Our northern finches, particularly redpolls, will feed heavily on the dwarf birch seeds found within the catkins. All I know is I was thankful it kept the moose wandering around out there. I’m always happy to have someone breaking trail.